Installing Tumbleweed, Jan 2015

I am planning to do a clean install of Tumbleweed every month. This will usually be a throwaway install. That is, I won’t be intending to keep the installed system. Rather, I am trying out the installer and I will report any bugs that I might find. I’m doing this because Tumbleweed is, in effect, a preview of the next mainline release (opensuse 13.3).

On this occasion, my install was to my laptop. I actually installed to an external 80G hard drive connected to the laptop.

Quick summary

The quick summary is that install mostly went well. I went with defaults for many options, so that the install resulted in the KDE desktop. The main surprise was to notice that the default MTA (mail transfer agent) is now “exim” rather than “postfix”.

Install media

I used the DVD installer, which I wrote to a USB using a command similar to

where “/dev/sdX” was the USB device (actually “/dev/sdd” on my desktop).

As you can see, this was the 20150103 snapshot. I had downloaded the iso file using “aria2c”. I also downloaded the checksum (the same filename, with “.sha256” appended to the end of the name. The checksum file was PGP signed, so I verified the signature. I then compared the checksum in the file with the checksum that I computed using the “sha356sum” command.

Ordinarily, one would verify the download with something like

sha256sum -c filename.sha256

But that did not work, because the downloaded “.sha256” file contained a full path that was inappropriate for my system. I actually reported that as bug 911685. It was the only bug that I reported related to this install.

Booting the installer

I plugged in only the USB prepared from the downloaded media file. I then powered up my laptop, and hit F12. That brings up the boot menu, and I selected the option to boot from a USB.

That got me to the installer boot menu. At this point, I plugged in the USB cable for the external drive where I planned to install Tumbleweed. I then selected “Install” from the menu, and proceeded to boot the installer.

After a few seconds, there was a screen to configure my WiFi network card. I did that, and gave it the network key. The installer then proceeded to the partitioning section. There, I chose to use existing partitions. On the first screen (which presented suggested partition), I selected “Create partitioning”. On the next screen, I selected “expert mode”. Then, on the next screen, there was an option to import partitioning. I used that, and was given a choice between my normal laptop partitions, and the partitions on the external drive. I chose the latter.

Boot setup

At this stage, I was asked about which desktop, about users, and about the timezone. I filled in those details. At some point, I indicated that I wanted to use online repos during the install (that was part of what I wanted to test). The installer then proceeded to the summary screen where one can click on headings to make changes.

The main changes that I made at this point were to enable sshd and to open a firewall. And then I clicked the Booting header to examine the booting proposal. The defaults were mostly correct. It wanted to use “grub2” for booting. So I clicked the “Installation details” button, to see the boot order. It correctly listed my external drive as first in boot order. Having checked that, I allowed the install to proceed.

Installation

The actual installation went smoothly. It was while watching the status information that I noticed that “exim” was being installed. Before long, I was prompted to reboot. I did that, and was soon using the newly installed system.

A final note

I am aware of another bug, though it was not a problem for this install. It shows up with 3.18 kernels, if you are using an encrypted partition. I actually was using an encrypted LVM with this install. However, bug 911319 only applies to systems with USB3 hardware, and my laptop is a few months too old for that.

When you use the repos, you are redirected to a suitable mirror. But if you are using IPv6, it is redirecting to slow mirrors. I added an IPv4 address for “download.opensuse.org” to my “/etc/hosts” file as a way to minimize this problem.